


Broken Lovelorn on Your Rocks

by Cambusmore



Category: Arthurian Mythology
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:23:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cambusmore/pseuds/Cambusmore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Guinevere's plan to protect a friend forces Lancelot to try to untangle his feelings for her and for Arthur.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Broken Lovelorn on Your Rocks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sasha_b](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sasha_b/gifts).



> WARNING: This work refers to, but does not describe, sexual and physical violence against women.
> 
> A yuletide treat.
> 
> Ta to betas.

“You what?” asks Arthur, daring her to repeat it, so low that most of the throng only see his lips move.

“I am certain you heard me, but I said that until you can guarantee the safety of the women of Britain, we are withdrawing our society from that of men. Starting now,” Guinevere says.

When the Queen rises from dinner, so does everyone else, save the King. So now everyone in the hall stands silently, not knowing why they are doing it as dinner clearly is not over yet. They’ve only just sat down. Some boys are even still poised, arms shaking under the weight of their platters, to serve venison to some especially forlorn courtiers. They watch as their meat drips and cools. Others, bumpkins and gossips, crane their necks as if that will help them hear what’s being said.

“Is this about Hafwen?”

Of course it’s about Hafwen, thinks Lancelot. Ever since they sent Hafwen’s loathsome husband away in the first place some years ago, she and Guinevere have established an alliance of mutual defense, punishing each other’s detractors with what they can muster, withering looks mostly. Occasionally, they are moved to action, like at present. For now the husband – what’s his stupid Roman name again? right, Marcus – has turned up from Letocetum, unexpected, unwanted, and demanding his conjugal rights so that he can beget an heir on her. It was horrible enough to hear him announce his intentions at petitions, but the stricken look on Hafwen’s face as he said it moved Lancelot to the very edge of violence. It spoke of shame and fear, of something only half-believed, as if she had seen a ghost and it turned out to be a malevolent one. Later, eyes closed and resting her forehead on the cool stone of the library wall, she had confessed to him that she pretended that Marcus was dead because it was a nice thought. But Arthur had not been able to deny the man his rights despite his history, and the next morning Hafwen had appeared to take her place among Guinevere’s ladies, quiet and not quite able to walk properly. The Queen had demanded a solution from the King. He insisted he could do nothing to change – his voice rose as her eyes rolled – the laws of Britain in place since the Romans.

Romans, thought Lancelot with contempt.

“Romans?!” Guinevere had shouted and swept out of the library. She had a way, which was very much part of how they felt about each other, of saying out loud what he only thought.

She is about to do it again.

“Of course it’s about Hafwen,” says Guinevere with heat and Lancelot twitches a smile. “But it holds true for all the women of Britain.” She leans in closer so that she’s inches from his face. “If you can’t protect my closest friend, what hope is there for anyone else?” It may not be meant as a jibe, but it comes out as one, that last word as sibilant as a snake’s hiss. 

Everyone who was around at the time cannot then help but think of her abduction by Melwas. Arthur had been away, as usual, then hastily called back from some petty negotiation of succession in York to turn to stone as Kay trembled and told him. Gone – into thin air, he said. Lancelot’s out looking, but no word yet. There was a detachment with her, he insisted. Also missing, he admitted. Over the next, horrible few days, there had been those who insisted this was the King’s chance to take a wife who could bear him an heir. Lot, for one, the bishop, of course, and most disappointingly, Elaine, all had expressed a variation on the same treachery: let Melwas have her. And to each, he had spoken like ice itself, “Consider yourself fortunate that Lancelot is not here to make you regret your words. He has not my restraint.” 

He doesn’t. Once he had found Guinevere and she could speak well enough to say who had taken her, Lancelot had run to Melwas’ smoked out and filthy keep, his leg streaming blood from a booby trap, and screamed himself hoarse at him, waving his sword around in a convincing sketch of his intentions. Arthur was there as well trying to find out what had happened, although more diplomatically, and had watched in grim shock as his friend went to pieces, Melwas smirking at his side. Before Lancelot could kill anyone as he was promising to do, however, he slipped in the spreading puddle of his own blood beneath him and knocked himself out on the flagstones. Days later, she told him she loved him, as he shivered so hard from fever that the sound of his teeth chattering was louder than the storm outside. 

“You can’t die.” Her eyes were large and anxious in the darkness of the little Avalon room.

“Tr-trying,” he got out.

“Well, try harder.” She hesitated, glared the attendant out of the room. “Arthur needs you. I need you. Please.” Guinevere choked and her tears spilled over. His eyes were closed so he wouldn’t have to see her distress, but he slid them open again when the tiny cot shifted as she stretched out next to him. He had never been in a bed with her before. He had been in hallways and alcoves and ruined cottages and against trees, but never something so mundane as a bed. Even through the thrumming pain of his leg and the waves of hot and cold that chased each other all over his skin, he could feel the glow of her there, like a reason to live. She pulled herself up along his uninjured side, and it became obvious she was doing it on purpose, letting him feel the slide of her whole body against his. The clicking of his teeth grew quieter, subsided altogether. When her mouth was next to his ear, she said, “You know, don’t you? You know that I love you.”

“Arthur-” he started, not sure what he meant to say.

She cut him off, whispering, “He says I can. He loves you, too. He told me. He says that we both can.”

Lancelot had the illness to blame for the strangled little whimper that snuck past his throat.

The women in the hall start to move in concert at some unseen signal from Guinevere, making their way to the doors with no small amount of nervous and exhilarated laughter. It makes for an impressive sight and they know it, chins are up and eyebrows arch, as their husbands gawp at their retreating figures. The blank disbelief on Hafwen’s face looks like it might pin her in place forever, but after a moment’s pause, she crosses the hall to join Guinevere watching the women file out. They leave last, and as Guinevere passes him, close enough that her gown just snags against his leggings, she looks at him in their old way. 

***

No one can legally keep Marcus away from Hafwen, however, so he claims her only an hour or so later from the packed ladies’ sitting room. Lancelot can only imagine the looks he got for it, but all the feminine contempt in the world has done nothing to preserve her from harm. In the morning, she appears late, stiff and quieter still. It’s dire enough that Galahad, Galahad who hates him with the vehemence of a man and an enemy, although he is a child and his son, tugs on his sleeve as he is about pass him, unseeing and preoccupied, on the way to council. 

“Do something,” he implores with fervent blue eyes, a look he usually reserves for the denunciation of heathens. 

Lancelot knows that he means Hafwen. Of all the people of Camelot, Arthur, Gareth and Hafwen are the only ones who Galahad likes, or at least, doesn’t hate. He may not be capable of more. But he doesn’t hate Hafwen, has been talking about her steadily since the day she turned up at court, even though she is nearly a decade older than him and unapologetically pagan at that. It’s her looks of gentle challenge that shut him up when he starts ranting about whores and idols in the exact cadence of the bishop. It has never made sense, Galahad’s feeling for Hafwen, and for that reason, Lancelot thinks it must be deep and genuine. “I can’t do anything, I’m afraid. Not legally.” Only the second or third time his son has ever asked him for anything and he can’t grant his request. He wants to beg him for forgiveness on his knees.

“Huh. Legally,” the boy scoffs, and, not for the first time, Lancelot looks down at his solemn white face, so much like his own, and worries about what kind of man he’ll become if he already has contempt for the rules that impart their humanity, separate them from the Saxons and the Franks.

“Galahad, I will do what I can, what Arthur and the law allow,” but he’s turned to walk away before Lancelot gets to the end of his promise.

***  
After a nearly a week of the women holding out, the tempers of the married men begin to fray. When they are home, they expect their wives to be available; that is the point of them. And so when they’d all walked out of the hall that night, the men had chuckled, surprised and embarrassed, promising each other that they’d be begging for it within days. But it turns out that the women have resolve to go along with their convictions and as none of Arthur’s knights would force their wives, they grow frustrated. Some threaten to visit the already harried prostitutes of Camelot village, but the King is clear on that point: at home, no whores. There is a local reputation to uphold. Galahad is over the moon at what he sees as piety, but is really shrewd pragmatism. One does not shit where one also eats. And so some of the men acquire a haunted look, their eyes ringed with a slight desperation and their hair in disarray from no one telling them to smooth it. Lancelot and Bedwyr, the sole knights unmarried, can smirk at the utter collapse of the men’s dignity after only one week without a swive. The women, conscious of their growing power, have stopped giggling altogether. Their smiles become knowing and arrogant. There is only one person who won’t play: Marcus, obtuse enough to be unaware that the entire kingdom has stopped for him, continues to throw Hafwen around like his spending depends on it, which it must. 

Matters become suddenly urgent one afternoon because it is hot. Despite the thick stone walls that seep cool and damp on most days and the narrow windows high above them that admit little heat and light, the council room feels like the kitchens. The air is soupy and still, discomfort vexing the knights assembled around the table that was part of Guinevere’s bride gift to Arthur. No one sits entirely vertical, for even stripped to a minimum of clothing – tunics, belts and leggings – the heat bows them and their swiveless misery becomes contagious, even for Lancelot for whom it represents the usual state of affairs. It had been better outside in the garden this morning, the constant liquid din of the fountain suggesting cool, if not imparting it. But then Guinevere had complained about how much wool clothing the women had to wear, even on days like this one, and Galahad had replied, "The Christian woman finds joy in modesty, my lady," as he lounged at his ease in a wisp of a tunic from the shade of a pagan oak. And Hafwen forgot to glare because Hafwen was thinking of other things and couldn’t have turned her injured neck that way anyway. By the time council is set to start in the late afternoon, Lancelot can discern by the set of his jaw that Arthur is unhappy. Guinevere won’t have him, his garden idyll ended in a child admonishing his wife for wantonness, and the weather makes him feel it all the more. He is from the North and he likes to be cold. 

“Lancelot, Bedwyr, you drink the most.” Confusing. They’ve just spent an hour sweating over a long and fraught discussion on the Church’s encroachment on a sacred grove in Chester.

“Sir?” ventures Bedwyr uncertainly.

“I want this problem with the women resolved. I can’t do anything about Marcus, not officially, but I need you to incapacitate him. Take him out, drink him under the table, or to death, I don’t care either way, so long as he can’t touch her when you’re done with him. I want him barely alive. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s not much of a solution. Sir,” adds Lancelot, always forgetting the honorific.

“I grant that it is impermanent. If you can do this for a few nights, scare him away, maybe all the way back to Letocetum, it will give me time to make a meaningful change to the law without the Church accusing me of blasphemy and without having to see the state of that poor girl every day. Her safety is now your responsibility.” Hardly fair, but point taken. It needs to be someone’s.

Council breaks up and stretches. There is the sound of impending relief in a distant roll of thunder. Bedwyr and Lancelot wander over to where Arthur sits, signing and sealing things proffered speedily by his clerk. At length, the clerk hurries away, calling for runners and Arthur sits back in his Roman chair, his dark hair flopping boyishly onto his forehead. When he’s ready to talk again, he offers them a tight smile. He looks tired.

“Who’s paying for this bacchanalia, eh?” asks Bedwyr.

“I will, just so long as the women come back to bed. There’ll be murders before long if they don’t.”

“Maybe we can leave him with one of the village girls, let her take care of whatever he wants,” suggests Lancelot.

“No,” says Arthur and grabs his arm. They both look down at his hand there. 

It’s at inopportune times like this that is comes roaring back in desperate, fleeting snatches, bits of memory fighting their way to the present and taking hold for the briefest and most transporting moment. The weight of Arthur on top of him, the rasp of a day’s beard against his cheek, a groan in his ear, the spasmodic clutch of fingers on his hips. Sensation stutters through Lancelot like a heartbeat. The first time was the day Arthur learned his own name, the day he inherited the earth, the day after he fucked his sister, knowing her only as Lot’s betrothed. He threw up on his hands and knees for hours until there was nothing left inside him, while Lancelot sat in the dirt nearby, trying to understand what his new friend was choking out past his sickness and his accent. He needed to feel something else, someone else, he had said, when much time and wine has passed. 

“Let’s go find a woman,” said Lancelot. 

“No,” said Arthur and his big hand wrapped around Lancelot’s forearm. His gaze tarried there, watching the golden hand stark against his white skin even in moonlight, and he knew that he wanted it, just as he knew that this northern boy was to be his life.

When he looks up from the hand on his arm, that uncanny image of almost twenty years ago, Arthur is watching him and he knows that he is remembering as well. His hand drops. “No village girls. If he does that to Hafwen, I can’t imagine what he would do to one of them.” He starts collecting scrolls, piling them in his arms even though it’s a job for a runner, and so the conversation ends. Lancelot tries not to hurry from the room, but the slap of his hobnail boots on the flagstones sounds urgent.

***

Marcus is suspicious when they first fetch him from Hafwen’s rooms after dinner. It is an understandable reaction to two people who have been scowling at you like furies for the past few weeks presenting themselves smilingly at your door and offering to take you out to the village to imbibe. But then again, Marcus is not overly burdened with the healthy suspicion afforded to God’s or the goddess’ shrewder creatures, so he is easily persuaded with some false smiles that these people who formerly despised him now want the pleasure of his company.

“Be good to get away from the woman anyway – she’s tiring me out.”

Behind him, Hafwen’s eyes flick up at Lancelot and the look he catches is indescribable in its complexity, so many feelings showing in her large grey and green eyes, that he doesn’t know what he is seeing, but does know that he must react to it. Her distress is compelling. 

So they head off to the village, making up the distance with stilted chatter as they ride, and choose the largest and best-provisioned inn, Menid’s, where everyone looks up when they enter. Commerce ceases. Lancelot and Bedwyr are used to this, but still embarrassed by it because it’s such a fuss. Marcus loves it. He somehow seems to think the awe partly for him, and his chin rises up several notches from his thin neck so that by the time they reach a table, it looks as if it has led him there. 

They mix mead, ale, wine and Avalonian apple brandy, most unwisely. Bedwyr asks patronizing questions about crop yields and rents. He can do this because he had paid attention growing up on his father's Welsh marsh of a farm. Lancelot cannot because he'd grown up running from his father's Christian intransigence to revel in the attention, and later the body, of the lady of Black Lake, Vivienne. 

They're soon very drunk and it's going not badly until Marcus manages to become both perceptive and indiscreet in his stupor.

“Which one of them do you like?” he asks, reckless, oblivious. He's looking at Lancelot when he says it.

“What?” scoffs Lancelot.

Bedwyr looks just shy of appalled.

“Is it King or Queen? I reckon it's him.”

Bedwyr winces, “I would take that back.”

“You're all the same, you know. You all pretend you aren't giving each other amorous looks all day, but I have eyes, you know, and you are. You all need a good Beltane rutting, you know, to sort things out. Even that pretty little Breton pet Arthur keeps–”

Bedwyr prompts warningly, “Arthur?” because Lancelot can no longer speak.

“Yes, Arthur. Oh, you want me to say the King. Or his lordship. Regardless. I speak now of that comely boy that hates everyone, that Galahad. Everyone except for Hafwen. I've seen the way he watches her in and out of rooms. You all just need to fuck each other. Except for him. If that little catamite ever touches my wife–”

Two things happen simultaneously. One is that Lancelot stands up because the old feeling comes over him, when the edges of his vision darken and he can't hear anymore for the roar of suspended violence in his ears and the thudding pressure in his skull. This is usually the last thing he remembers before he stumbles back to awareness, often covered in blood, occasionally with a Saxon still flailing, skewered on his sword. This, this easy and whole-hearted rage, coupled with his way of placating Guinevere when she turns difficult, is known colloquially as the Breton Touch. It's love and violence and one in the name of the other all at once. Right now, he doesn't know if he's stood to stop himself from plucking Marcus' teeth out of his jaw or to get away before he does. The other thing that happens at the same time, luckily or not, depending on your mood, is that Marcus passes out mid-threat, upsetting his tankard and sending ale and foam splattering to the floor and all over himself.

On the way back to the castle, they ride three aloft, although Marcus is tied to his saddle between them. Lancelot takes no small pleasure in watching his unconscious head bounce sickeningly with every bump of the road. That satisfying motion provides distraction from the mortifying pronouncements of the drunken idiot, at least fleetingly. As with all repetitive motions, however, they grow oddly entrancing and Lancelot's mind eventually rushes to fill itself to overflowing. 

A long time ago, Lancelot had run all the way to Black Lake, the sting of the switch still buzzing on his back, and Vivienne had said, "You will love two people and it will ruin your life." 

"Thanks," he had replied and rolled back on top of her. Heedless in youth, he'd barely thought about what she said because there were better things to do, like rut and outrage his father's virtue. Now, older and no wiser, Lancelot remains uncertain as to how things turned out this way. He doesn't know when his respective loves for Arthur and Guinevere got all tangled up so that he couldn't tell where one started and the other ended. They're indivisible now, part of the same heartrending feeling that has haunted him for the last twenty years. There are grim mornings and tortured nights when he thinks that he wouldn't exist without them, that he would cease to be for lack of feeling. And then he tries to isolate the exact moment this tragedy befell him, so that he can focus all his regret on it and vow to whoever listens to such pleas that he would take it back if it only meant he could be free. 

It could have begun all those years past when he found himself fighting back-to-back with a Roman-looking boy his age who shouted clever orders at him in an impenetrable accent. Or when he came to a Welsh clearing, exhausted and bored by his errand, and found an impossibly striking girl there whom he silently vowed he would marry, no matter who she was. There's no difference now between those feelings. And as much as he appeals to silent deities to take the horrible, intractable emotion away, he knows somehow that he would never give it up, not for anyone, not for either of them. His wife would have gladly told you all about it, she who knew him all too well in that way, but Elaine's long dead.

He decides to ask Bedwyr while they're so drunk there's a chance he'll forget. "Is that what people think?

"What?" Neither of them has spoken in a long time.

"What he said. Is that what people think? Of me?"

"Oh," a too-long beat, "no."

That means yes.

***

When Hafwen inches open the door, Lancelot makes sure that she will see his own smiling face first, rather than any part of Marcus' inert form. She still flinches, but her old look of heavy-lidded boredom falls in place like a curtain a moment later. The Breton Touch, gentling women in its wake.

He shrugs the shoulder over which Marcus is draped to show her he's nearly dead. "Where do you want him?"

"I want him not at all."

"I need a physical location."

"On the embrasure around the corner then, balanced precariously. Is it windy out?"

"Can't. Bedwyr's throwing up out of it."

She sighs. "In the bed then, I suppose."

When he's dropped him into it as hard and as awkwardly as possible, he wipes his hands on his leggings and grins. "I was hoping you would say the floor."

"Don't worry the feathers will prick him a little."

"We'll do it for as many nights as we need to."

"Thank you."

"I swear he will leave soon."

"Thank you," she says again, not yet ready to hope.

***

It takes three more nights of debilitating swilling, which Marcus gladly participates in thinking he's earned favour among the King's closest friends. On the fourth day, Hafwen joins Guinevere in the garden and informs her that he is unable to get out of bed and has told her to "fuck right off" and grant him peace from her hovering female attentions. "I never so much as looked at him," she sniffs.

That same morning, a breathless message arrives from Letocetum. Militant druids have burned down Marcus' family chapel. It seems an unlikely occurrence, but it's enough to get him out of bed and frothing at the mouth with a momentum that threatens to carry him all the way back home. It's convenient, this act of arson, convenient and dubious enough to be a fabrication, but no one cares. The knight's fretting around the council's round table that afternoon cross their fingers that the women will uncross their legs that night.

Marcus says his insinuating farewells in the forecourt a few hours later and very few of those in attendance manage to conceal their disdain. They are arrayed in two lines on either side of Hafwen like defensive flanks, poised to close in on Marcus who blithely prattles on about immolating druids, smiling throughout. There is no need to pretend even the mildest affection for this prick any longer, so no one does. But the man remains deaf to the din of loathing around him, thanking Arthur for his hospitality and patting a miserable Hafwen on the bottom in parting.

"You'll send her back before she gets too big to ride." 

Arthur nods coldly, his eyes darker with contempt.

There are smirks all around at that, as Hafwen is the local abortionist.

When Marcus is but a retreating streak of dust on the road east, Arthur turns to Guinevere, pleading slightly. "Is that good enough?"

"No. Hafwen is one woman, granted, an important one to all of us, but only one. There should be a change to the law."

"I cannot change the law, Gwen. Not quickly."

"You are the law."

Lancelot watches them watch each other until Arthur looks away to think. He has never been able to make decisions with her large eyes full of pathos in his line of sight. "Alright," he says quietly when he looks back and she smiles like the sun breaking from behind a cloud.

***

"Thank you," says Hafwen. 

They are on the ramparts where they meet sometimes to make fun of people after petitions or fetes. He hadn't been sure she would be there, but of course she was, because they never get sick of how much they gently scorn everyone else.

"Thank Gwen."

"I have."

Lancelot leans over an archer's chink in the wall to look out at the dim outlines of Camelot village in the darkness below. "I reckon there'll be lots of little girls named Hafwen in the next year around here." 

"Unlucky for them."

"Why? It's a nice name."

"So's Lancelot."

"It isn't my real name."

Her eyes widen. "It isn't?"

"No."

"Well, what is it then?"

A sidelong glance at her, "Galahad."

"Huh."

"Don't tell him because he'll change it."

Her quiet chuckle bounces off the rampart and into the forecourt below. A sentry looks up in mild alarm, but they wave reassurance in his direction.

"I'm surprised we can't hear everyone fucking," he mutters.

"I'm surprised the castle isn't moving." She is smirking. 

"Everyone at it except for us."

Suddenly, it's serious; Lancelot's lament that Hafwen has heard obliquely a thousand times since they became fast friends five years ago. "Try not to think about it."

"Oh, I always try."

"Well, I would offer, but I don't think Galahad would like it."

"Ha, no. He would die." Pushing himself off the wall, he exhales sharply with decision. Time to languish horizontal instead of upright. "Goodnight, Hafwen."

"Sweet dreams, Lancelot."

***

He has to walk through half the castle to get to his rooms, but it's late and people are busy, so there is no forced chatter or feigned good humour required of him. Nearing Arthur's wing, the dangling legs of a page kick rhythmically from an alcove seat. If his page is still up, then so is he. Lancelot closes the distance to the library door and sees that the swinging legs belong to Galahad. They face each other, one standing, towering probably, and one seated, doing the most boyish thing his father has ever caught him doing. The legs stop swinging. Galahad looks at his father with a hint of curiosity underlying his usual mask of duty and gives him a quick and measured nod. Lancelot stops breathing at that because his throat has constricted painfully at this small, tiny gesture of thanks from his boy.

"Galahad," Arthur's voice behind him, gentle as always for the pages, "you're dismissed. Thank you." What a man to thank his minions. "Lance, come have a drink if you can bear it."

***

The three of them drink steadily for hours, talking very little, until so late that the first tinges of grey threaten the deepest blue through the glazed window of the library.

It isn’t the first time they’ve ended up like this, all three too drunk to move. And it wouldn’t matter a bit, wouldn't mean a thing, if they weren’t them and there wasn’t so much between them. Suddenly, it's there in the room. Lancelot can feel it in the air, that shift towards possibility, and it races down his skin like the fires they used to set in Lanascol to awaken the fallow earth. That’s what it’s like, like waking up, painfully aware, or breaking the surface of the water to breathe before it's too late. He knows he’s not the only one who feels the change because he hears Arthur, placid, unflappable Arthur, swallow. It’s never even gotten this far before. Guinevere always leaves as soon as she’s aware of it. But not this time. This time she’s still here, looking a bit stricken and gazing out the window that shows nothing but pre-dawn gloom. Arthur looks at him. They watch each other for a moment, and he knows he can’t move because he has so much more to lose, everything really. There is a pitch building around them in anticipation of Guinevere's panicked departure. She will leave, she always does. But then she doesn't, she isn't, she just stares out the window, although her fingers shake a little on the arms of her chair. Arthur is still looking at him. Lancelot waits. And when Guinevere does stand, it isn't to leave, but to come to sit, very tentatively, eyes averted, on Lancelot's lap. Arthur considers the desperate appeal Lancelot knows is in his eyes, watching over Guinevere's bowed head for a moment longer before he walks over to them, resting a large, warm hand on the back of each of their necks.


End file.
